Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass — The Tenniel Illustrated Edition (eBook)

Both of Lewis Carroll's Alice books, complete in one edition — with every one of John Tenniel's illustrations restored to its place in the text.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) belong together, and here they are: the boat-trip tale that became the most beloved children's book in English, and its chessboard sequel — printed from the texts of the early Macmillan editions and cross-checked chapter by chapter against them.

THE PICTURES ARE THE POINT. Tenniel drew 42 illustrations for Wonderland and 50 for Looking-Glass, and Carroll supervised them so closely that he withdrew the entire first printing of 1865 over the quality of their reproduction. Yet the copies of these books that circulate free online today have had the pictures stripped out — the standard Project Gutenberg texts of both books contain none of them. This edition puts all 92 back, extracted from scans of the early Macmillan printings at full resolution, each one set at the passage it illustrates — plus the Looking-Glass chessboard diagram, the Dramatis Personæ table, and Carroll's prefatory poems, including "All in the golden afternoon," which the online Wonderland text omits altogether.

INSIDE THE COMPANION APPARATUS:

• An introduction telling the whole story: the golden afternoon of 4 July 1862 on the Isis, Alice Liddell and the hand-written Alice's Adventures Under Ground, the suppressed first edition of 1865, and the making of the sequel

• Who's Who — Alice, the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Hatter, the Queens (all three, carefully distinguished), Humpty Dumpty, the Tweedles, the Lion and the Unicorn, the White Knight, and more

• Five explainers: the famous parodies decoded (what Carroll's crocodile, Father William, and lobster are doing to the improving poems of his childhood); the logic, language, and mathematics jokes of a Christ Church don; the chess game of Looking-Glass, move by move; nonsense as a genre, from Edward Lear onward; and Tenniel and the pictures — how the Dalziel brothers' wood engravings carried his drawings to the page

• A short life of Lewis Carroll / C. L. Dodgson, told factually and without sensationalism

• A note on the period — Victorian childhood, Sunday-school verse, and the world the jokes were aimed at

• Discussion questions for all 24 chapters plus the whole books — written for adult book clubs and for families and classrooms reading together

Honest production notes, because readers deserve them: the text of both books is verified against three witnesses; the "Wasp in a Wig" episode is NOT included — Carroll cut it before publication in 1871, and it belongs to a scholarly supplement, not to the book he published; the Mouse's tale is set as verse (the 1872 printing winds it down the page in the shape of a tail, as the period note explains). Public domain, declared as such; the introduction, notes, and questions are new.

Read it again — this time with the pictures.